StepN by Find Satoshi Lab

StepN is a move2earn mobile game. It aims to attract million of non-crypto runners to the crypto realm through playing the game, whilst some game's profit goes to carbon offsetting.

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Inspiration

Inspired by Australian bush fire in 2021, we want to create a project to contribute to carbon neutralization. The idea started to get a clearer shape after we saw the success of Game-Fi, we gave it a little twist, we changed game mechanics from play2earn to move2earn, where game’s profit is decided in a DAO manner – with a minimum 10% goes to carbon reduction.

What it does

Find Satoshi Lab is the company behind the design of StepN, it is a mobile game pays players game token for each step they move; game token can be earned either passively or actively, and governance token can be earned after player hits max level. To play the game, player must have a NFT sneaker, which can be bought or rent at no cost. Player can level up, add gemstones and produce new NFT sneakers in game through burning game tokens and/or governance tokens.

Player can participate online Marathon to compete for top leader-board position and get rewards, or spend energy to do a power run to earn not only game/governance tokens, but also achievements and NFT badges. Certain NFT badges allow player to have certain perks in-game.

The essence of the game is to create a massive funnel to get non-crypto runners to the crypto community, starting from get them earn some tokens in their wallet by walking or running. Once they have some tokens in their wallet, they will think about cashing out, this will motivate them to learn how to use decentralized wallet and register to exchanges.

How we built it

The idea of move2earn comes from a brainstorm session, where we initially wanted to do a Monopoly style game, during the discussion of how many steps a player should move on the play-board, one option was the player has to physically make the move, and we loved this idea. The entire game was then rebuilt around this move2earn concept.

Several game development documents were drafted and refined, when we structured the game, we studied the popular Game-Fi on the market and concluded a successful mobile Game-Fi has to be able to transfer game asset conveniently, promptly and cheaply. So, we build the game around a built-in decentralized wallet that can transfer multiple chain’s assets, a swap and cross-chain convert. After comparing and contrasting several top public chains, we picked Algorand and Solana to build on, Solana won because we found deploying on Algorand requires more works and its smart contract function is yet to be released.

Our perception changed several times during we made this game, initially we think the financial part is important, because this is what draw people to play the game. Then we realized what really retain players is the game itself, there will always be a game that can makes more money in the future, if the financial part is the only thing retains the player, it will most likely fail when the next big thing come out. Hence instead of rushing the game, we then returned to the drawing board and refined on our game parts. We added a comprehensive achievement/challenge system, and we NFT it and develop further game plots to put a value/meaning to these NFT badges, this could be the biggest player retainer to us.

Challenges we ran into

NFT sneaker design (working on it).

Game's balance among runner, gamer and crypto player (solving - game will not display features if it is not intended to certain player type, e.g. sneaker renter will not see gem socket, level up or sneaker production; we are also working on attribute modeling).

It is hard to involve "gene" in the production of sneaker section (solved through mystic sneaker socket)

Game token always have a high sell pressure (solved through design a token sunk - gemstone, and a consistent token drain for consistent token earn - repair system)

Anti-cheating mechanism design (solving through machine learning).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One co-founder ran 200kms in a month to test all running apps, then had his appendix and 1/3 colon removed due to appendicular mass. Work carried out even he was immobilized on hospital bed.

Finished UI design v2, working on v3, working toward internal test end Oct and MVP end Nov.

Complete seed round with 3 times over subscription, investors are all tier-1 investment firms, both crypto native and traditional funds.

Have advisors from game, running app and blockchain industries to help us refine the product.

What we learned

A good game producer can save a lot of time and head scratching (lucky we have one with 15 years experience).

Don’t exercise right after eating.

Give project a good name is very hard work (still working on it)

Don’t start pitching capitals until the team find what is the real pain point or sweat spot.

A good Game-Fi project must be a good game first, a smooth-running application second, and has a tokenomic that makes sense third.

Sometime focusing too much on the nitty gritty makes you lose perspective; we need constantly tell ourselves what is our vision and stop tunnel vision on things.

What's next for Find Satoshi

Finish private round and release MVP in Nov, use fund raised to get 1 million non-crypto players before the end of this year.

24th Oct Update

v2.o working demo is available for testing, feature include: GPS tracking fuction; Level up sneaker; Mystery Box looting; Better user account interface; Better sneaker detail page; Simplified version of wallet.

v2.0 demo video: https://youtu.be/-0nS-ZtJmkU

Addressing to judging criteria

Potential Impact StepN has potential to bring tenth of million new users to solana ecosystem through funneling runners to crypto player.

Functionality The project is in alpha testing and we will start public beta testing within a week.

Novelty There is no move2earn game on mobile devices other than ours.

Design We have several well experienced game developer and UI/UX designer working on this proejct.

Go-to-market Strategy We will start from building crypto community before the full product releases to the market, after the full product release, we will focus on non-crypto runners and leverage main stream media on the topic of carbon reduction.

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